


i'm trying to find my peace in this cold war

by turnip (calculus)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Androids, Character Study, Gen, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 04:34:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15040823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calculus/pseuds/turnip
Summary: Yixing didn't expect to find anything on his way back home from work today.





	i'm trying to find my peace in this cold war

**Author's Note:**

> this was written back in 2013/14 right around the departure of lu han from exo, and remained untouched since then. a lot of the worldbuilding done here was meant to be expanded, but given my lack of interest, nothing really panned out.

Yixing clocks out at 5PM every day. Well, most days, he tends to stay a little past five just because he’s too caught in what he’s doing, but Chanyeol usually comes over after ten minutes and shakes him out of his trance and ushers him out with a big grin and a reminder to eat something for dinner.

Today’s no different. He’s in the middle of testing the latest repairs he made to to a modified ATV that Zitao brought in a week ago after his latest riding adventure had ended up with a moderately painless crash into an unforeseen tree in the forest track when a pair of hands settle onto his shoulders and start massaging into the muscle without warning. He yelps and almost drops the wrench in his hand on his thankfully boot-covered foot, but manages to grasp it in time. There’s the exhalation of a laugh behind him before it’s quickly stifled, but Yixing’s already jerked out of his zone and turns around with deadpan eyes at a Chanyeol biting back a wide smile.

“Really?” is all he asks, mild and paired with a dimpled quirk of his lips, and Chanyeol holds his hand together in apology.

“Sorry, sorry. I didn’t think you’d react that big,” he says, laughing again, and scratches the back of his head sheepishly. “Actually, I was gonna blow on your neck, but I guess I’m glad I stuck to just the massage.”

Yixing twists his lips into a wry smile and sets his wrench down gently on his worktable, pulling the towel draped over his shoulder off. “You and me both.”

Chanyeol grins and shrugs. “Anyway, it’s time for you to pack up, hyung. You worked hard today.”

“Thanks. I guess it’s time I go home and catch up on my daily dramas then,” Yixing says jokingly, getting up off his stool. Chanyeol laughs at that and knocks shoulders with him.

“Remember to record tonight’s episode of Masterchef, hyung, remember, you promised!” Chanyeol reminds, wagging his index finger at Yixing. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And remember to _eat_ , okay, don’t get all spacey and end up feeding all your food to the neighbor’s pitbull again.”

Yixing pouts at Chanyeol, gathering his scattered belongings. He ejects his SD card from the mainframe at his desk and slips it into opening on the side of his lensless spectacles, pressing the ON button discreetly hidden on the handle of his frame. He ignores the flashes of messages that pop up on the holographic screen of his glasses, and shoves the uneaten lunchbox he’d brought in from home today back into his knapsack.

“It was one time, and he looked hungry. How could I resist?” Yixing defends himself, pushing out his bottom lip comically. Chanyeol snorts and does a finger wave before walking away, clapping the shoulder of his deskmate, Kyungsoo, who flinches and snaps out a leg to trip a giggling Chanyeol. Yixing sighs, watching the back of his friend fondly, before closing his knapsack and slinging it over his shoulder.

He clocks out at the old automated machine by the rec room, a holdover from the last days of the first Technological Boom, and waves goodbye to their half-asleep receptionist at the front desk, who comes out of his stupor long enough to blink a farewell.

Now, Yixing checks the notifications on his PD. There’s the general spam that manages to get past his custom filters every time, sales at a shoe store here and fifty-percent off at a clothing store there, and Yixing files them away into the trash bin with a blink of his eyes and a tilt of his fingertip, hand shoved inside his beaten bomber jacket. He weaves fluidly in and out of the street, avoiding the throngs of people walking hurriedly next to and away from him, all eager to get home.

He crosses onto a street lined with restaurants and bars, each with a greeter stationed outside with a pleasant smile and a slight mechanical chime in their voice tone. The steakhouse that he patrons on the rare occasions that Chanyeol decides to treat his whole team to dinner has a new greeter on standby today, a cheerful girl with artificial bright-red hair done up in a bun, who waves excitedly at him, and Yixing waves back, a little more sedately but no less sincere.

Joonmyeon left another message, this time about the necessities of giving back to the country that brought him to national recognition, and Yixing reluctantly skims through it before filing it away to his reply-later pile with a finger flick. Mother sent him an early birthday song, an acoustic chord strumming with congratulatory lyrics sung by his grandparents; this Yixing copies an extra file of and saves the original message onto the SD card.

He passes by a convenience store, still lost in sorting through his daily mail, before it registers in his mind and he backtracks. Krystal’s at the door today, dressed smartly in the JUNGSIS employee uniform, paper hat tugged over her hair smartly and on a tilt.

“Evening, Krystal,” he greets lightly. Krystal looks away from her blank smiling contest at the rival store a street over with its more androgynous counterpart, Amber (whom Yixing quite likes for her lackadaisical attitude, less common among her prototypes), and lights up with a genuine smile when she processes Yixing’s face.

“Yixing-ssi! Hello! Are you buying dinner again?” Krystal greets. Yixing nods with a shrug and pulls away his spectacles, turning them off in the process, and folding them away into his jacket pocket.

“Yeah, gotta keep the body well-nourished and cared for, y’know?” Yixing says pleasantly. Krystal laughs lightly, tossing her red hair (a promotion for JUNGSIS’ newest line of shampoos, Yixing vaguely recalls) back. Yixing smiles again and walks in through the automated doors of the store, waving goodbye to Krystal.

Today’s special at the food market section is pre-packaged _zhajiangmian_ , with an optional hard-boiled tea egg on the side, so Yixing picks up two boxes of it and an extra three eggs because tea eggs are one of his favorites, convenience store food or not. He says a quick hello to the cook manning the counter today, a bright-faced automaton in place of the usual Seokjin (whom the automaton says is out sick from a nasty flu as he bags up Yixing’s order), and picks up an extra value-pack of toilet paper. At the self-serve cash register, Yixing deliberates before throwing in a pack of hawthorn candies at last minute.

He exits, but drops a few candy pieces in Krystal’s outstretched hand before waving goodbye, and grins to himself as he walks away when Krystal registers what was placed into her hands and lets out a delighted squeal.

Guangzhou isn’t particularly small, but there’s a marked difference between the area where he works and the area where he lives. It’s been a while since Guangzhou’s been fully industrialized, and most of the old buildings that once sat in the heart of the city center have been demolished to make way for the new age, but some still stand, stubborn and proud of its age and background. Yixing’s friend, Yifan, had grown up in one of these buildings, and left his apartment to Yixing when he’d first come to Guangzhou as a parting gift before Yifan had permanently relocated to the States. The space isn’t too big, held inside one of the remaining cinderblock buildings that crest the roads that mark the divide between Old and New Guangzhou, but it suits Yixing just fine.

The streets grow narrower as he gets closer to the dividing street that marks the entrance into his district, and the bright and loud stores that advertise clean shopping spaces and bright fluorescent lights give way to the grungier convenience stores and homely hole-in-the-wall restaurants that spill out onto the sidewalks with faded red tables and plastic seats for the customers to eat on. Yixing ducks a low-hanging banner of a recently opened KFC and turns the corner, entering into his residential district.

It’s at once both quieter and louder here, relatively away from the fast-paced bustle of the commerce areas of Guangzhou. White-haired and greying elders sit by their open doors of the sideway houses, spindly legs outstretched as they chew on peanuts and spit out the shells to the side, the stone pavements littered with chewed-up shell bits and cigarette butts. Today was a particularly humid day, and the line of creaking fans scattered around the streets prove it, along with the open windows all over the buildings, blaring out into the air a jumble of night-time newscasting and cartoon shows.

Yixing greets every person he passes by, and gets roped into a conversation every few apartments he passes by. Huang-taitai updates him on her family’s second move into the States, merrily cracking on sunflower seeds as she chatters excitedly; Liu-gong complains about the recent arthritic pains in his knees and the muggy humidity of the past week; Qian-jie talks to him about her husband’s newest business ventures as Yixing plays Superman with her son, Xun-xun. Yixing nods patiently and makes quiet blasting noises as he lifts up the borrowed action figure to battle Xun-xun’s dragon figurine. He extracts himself a few minutes later, promising Xun-xun to play again tomorrow, and bids the two goodnight before continuing his way home.

The building where Yixing lives shares the open space with the seven other buildings around it, with a communal lot for parked bicycles and motor-vehicles. This far away from the district’s New Guangzhou, not many people own the higher-end models—nor is there really the space for it—so, most of the residents rely on the cheapest ways to travel. Yixing’s own motorbike is neatly tucked in between a couple of ramshackle bikes owned by the aging couple a floor below him.

He approaches the lot now, a few minutes more after taking a quick shortcut through the old junkyard of an abandoned half-built metalshop, already grasping at the keys stowed away in his jacket pocket, and gingerly threads his way through rows of bikes; he almost doesn’t notice the cloth lump splayed over a couple of bikes that’d fallen under its weight. A sudden jerk from the lump, an angled flail that could only come from a limb of some sort, snaps Yixing out of his thoughts, and he quickly stops in his path. The lump jerks again, and Yixing turns to his right and makes his way to the erratically spazzing body—and it is a body, its arms and legs escaping the confines of the cloth covering over it and moving with abandon. He hesitates, a step away from body, the rational thought of perhaps contacting the police in case this turned out to be a murder flitting through his mind, before the cloth snags on one of the arms and drags downward, revealing the head and face of the unfortunate victim.

Yixing drops to his knees immediately, caution replaced with instant concern, and lifts the cloth from the body. He gently lifts the person’s head up onto his lap, careful not to jerk his body too much, and pushes away the bike wheel the head had been pillowed on. He does the same to the other two bikes trapped under the person’s limbs, and bunches up the cloth that had been shrouding his body and places it on the ground for the head to rest on instead. Satisfied that there’s enough space around the body for it to freely move, Yixing flicks a finger, checking the time since the body first started spasming. He estimates it’s been about a minute since he’d first sighted the body and its beginning spasms, and chews on his bottom lip in consternation, unhappy with just waiting.

The body stops, though, after a few more seconds of shaking and jerking, and slumps back onto the pavement. Yixing heaves an audible sigh of relief, and cautiously shifts until he’s kneeling right beside the person. Their face is smudged almost completely with dried streaks of mud and sludge, but the swell of an Adam’s apple marks them as a possible male. Yixing gently rubs off a particularly prominent clump of dried mud from their cheek, and slowly shifts them into recovery position, inwardly thanking Chen for making him sit through all EMT classes with him during his training.

He sits there for a while, content to wait for the person to come to consciousness. In the mean time, Yixing takes the time to go back to the email Joonmyeon had sent and reads through it again, frowning again when he gets to the lines of “taking responsibility for your creations” and “a duty to the future of humankind to continue”. The sky darkens to a purple orange by the time he finishes composing his response, and Yixing finds himself a touch grumpier than when he’d started out. He sighs and folds away his spectacles, lightly grazing over the sleep button on the top of his rims, and pockets them.

The body hasn’t moved since its earlier spell, save for the light rise-and-fall of the chest, and Yixing hovers over anxiously, a cold pin of dread dropping down his navel and slowly spreading outward. He lifts up a wrist and thumbs over the delicate skin, rubbing away at the dirt smeared over it until a light sallow tan is revealed—and a small black stylized M inked into the skin. Yixing blinks at this, a gear jogging in the back of his memory, but the hand jerks suddenly and slips out of his grasp, and the thought is quickly lost.

A groan slips out from the body, and Yixing hastily helps prop up the person as they blink themself awake and start to get up.

“Where...” the person croaks, as Yixing helps them sit up, leaning heavily against Yixing’s shoulder.

“Do you not remember what happened?” Yixing asks quietly, cataloguing the person’s grogginess and half-formed bewilderedness.

“...No....”

“Can you remember anything at all?” Yixing presses, dimple appearing from the force of his worried frown.

“...Home...” The person turns with difficulty, eyes settling on Yixing’s face but not registering anything, and jerkily drags up a hand until it’s level with Yixing’s cheek. Yixing waits patiently, expecting contact, but the hand drops immediately and the person slumps back into unconsciousness.

Yixing blinks a few times, and looks down at the person in his arms with wide eyes.

“Uh oh.”


End file.
